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New changes to Canada’s conditional sentence laws came into effect Tuesday.

And it means criminals who get jail sentences for more serious crimes such as aggravated assault will have to serve those sentences in jail, federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced.

Don’t laugh, we’re not making this stuff up.

Nicholson announced the latest changes to Canada’s controversial conditional sentence laws — where criminals “serve” their jail time at home instead of behind bars.

It’s the second time the Harper government has made changes to conditional sentences. Several years ago the Tories made a number of violent crimes ineligible for conditional sentences, such as impaired driving cause death.

The latest changes add to that list and will include crimes such as sexual assault, motor vehicle theft and arson.

What it means is that when a criminal is given a jail sentence of less than two years for any of these crimes, they will have to serve that sentence in jail, not at home.

That may seem like an obvious requirement — to actually serve a jail sentence in a jail. But this is another example of how off-the-rails our justice system has become over the years.

Conditional sentences were brought in by the previous Liberal government in 1996. They were designed with only one objective in mind — to reduce jail populations. It didn’t matter that serious, repeat criminals would be allowed to “serve their time” at home watching Sunday afternoon NFL football in their living rooms. The only thing that mattered was to reduce jail populations.

The conditional sentence law is a very peculiar one. On the one hand, the criminal code says that in order to receive a conditional sentence, the offence must be serious enough to warrant jail time of less than two years. In other words, if the offence doesn’t warrant jail time and calls for some probationary period instead, the court should not hand out a conditional sentence. Conditional sentences are only for those offences where jail time is called for. Once that’s determined, the court must then decide whether that “jail sentence” should be served in a jail or at home.

Make much sense? No, it makes no sense to me either.

How do you serve a jail sentence at home? If you serve it at home with conditions like curfews, no alcohol and no firearms, you’re not serving a jail sentence. You’re serving some type of probationary sentence in the community.

It has to be one of the dumbest laws on the books. If jail time is warranted, the criminal should serve the jail sentence in a jail. If it’s not warranted, then the criminal can pay a different type of penalty.

The truth is, it would have been a lot simpler for the federal government to eliminate conditional sentences altogether. The courts would still have a wide range of non-incarceratory options in front of them to deal with crimes that don’t warrant jail time.

For example, even under the Tories’ most recent changes, the courts can still give a car thief a non-jail sentence. They can get probation, time served, a conditional discharge etc. It just can’t be a conditional sentence.

It’s hardly a revolutionary change to the criminal justice system. It’s called common sense. And it’s somewhat laughable we’ve had this law on the books for the past 16 years.

It’s now time for Ottawa to tackle statutory release and parole reform. It’s great that more criminals will actually be serving their jail sentences in jail, but many are getting out too soon under Canada’s generous early release programs.

That should be the next target on the federal government’s justice reform hit-list.